Cytherea Part 22

"I am glad of that anyhow." But her vindictive tone betrayed the words.

"Although I can easily guess why you didn't--you were ashamed. You did kiss her; why won't you admit it?"

"What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use."

"Did she call you Lee?"

"h.e.l.l, f.a.n.n.y, what a G.o.d-forsaken lot of young nonsense!" His anger was mounting. "You can understand here as well as later that I am not going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more.

Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright pathetic, you are so ridiculous."

"You will stay exactly where you are until I get done." Her tone was perceptibly shriller. "And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only knew--disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up."

Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. "I won't have it!" Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare.

This, he realized, was worse than he had antic.i.p.ated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect f.a.n.n.y, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of f.a.n.n.y not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.

His princ.i.p.al recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a gla.s.s of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. "Stop it," he commanded sharply; "you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool."

"Only one kind," she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; "and I'm not going to be it much longer.

You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what--what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes." She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. f.a.n.n.y's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.

"In a minute more you'll be sick," he warned her.

"Oh, G.o.d," she whispered, "that's all he knows, all he feels! In a minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you d.a.m.ned fool," her voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch, "can't you understand I am dying?"

"No." His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control her wildness. "No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you.

But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop, now, at once."

If it didn't, he continued silently, he wouldn't be eternally responsible for himself; never a patient man, what might follow the end of his endurance was unpredictable. His feeling toward the woman before him was shifting, as well; the indifference was becoming bitterness; the bitterness glittered, like mica, with points of hatred. He felt this, like an actual substance, a jelly-like poison, in his blood, affecting his body and mind. It bred in him a refined brutality, an ingenious cruelty. "A mirror would shut you up quicker than anything else," he informed her; "you look like a woman of sixty--go somewhere and fix your face."

"It doesn't surprise me you are insulting," she replied, "but I didn't expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the worst."

"You talk as though there were no one but you in this," he said concisely; "and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves'

because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no--Savina, is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away--"

"Go back, then!" f.a.n.n.y cried. "Don't bother about me and your home and the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch me again."

"That needn't trouble you," he a.s.sured her.

"Not ... when you have her ... to touch." She could scarcely articulate, each word was p.r.o.nounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling effort. "You vile, rotten coward!"

The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was overwhelmed with its storm of tears and pa.s.sionate charges. "You ought to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me, treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman in New York." As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from her face. "G.o.d d.a.m.n you." Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a jarring blow.

In an instant of pa.s.sion Lee Randon caught f.a.n.n.y by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.

It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.

Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence--after the last audible dragging footfall of f.a.n.n.y slowly mounting the stairs--was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to f.a.n.n.y was already dead; f.a.n.n.y, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.

He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to f.a.n.n.y was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself.

His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction, cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality, frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of madness.

Nothing had altered his att.i.tude toward the woman who was his wife; all his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating.

Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture--sending the white fluff whirling through s.p.a.ce--and so be free to breathe. This house, the symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family--the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what was so well applauded.

The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats--where they were worn--of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went at once in search of f.a.n.n.y.

She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder, immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly, she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.

"f.a.n.n.y," he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his laboring being, "this is all over for me. As I told you so many times, I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours, and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done." Still she didn't move, reply. "I am going," he said more impatiently, "tonight. I want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife; I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to.

Everyone will tell you that I am no good--you see, I haven't the shadow of a cause for leaving--and the best thing you can do is believe them.

If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it."

She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. "I can't talk," she said; "the words are all hard like stones down in my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help."

"It wasn't Savina who did this," he informed her; "I want you to realize that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me--you couldn't--and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one you will use." f.a.n.n.y gazed at him in a clouding perplexity.

"I can't think it's true." Her voice was dazed. "A thing like this couldn't be happening to us, to me. It's only for a little, we are both cross--"

He cut her short with the a.s.surance that what he said he meant.

Sentimental indulgence, he felt, was dangerously out of place. She slipped back, supine, on the bed; and, with short sobs, she cried, "Go!

Go! Go!"

In his room he methodically and thoughtfully a.s.sembled the necessities for his bag; he was arranging mentally the details of his act. Where, primarily, it affected f.a.n.n.y and the children, his lawyers could handle it best; it was the present consequences to himself, the step immediately before him, that demanded consideration. But his deliberation was lost in the knowledge that he would go to New York where, inevitably, he should see Savina. No one could predict what would determine that; it would unfold, his affair with Savina must conclude, as it had begun--in obedience to pressures beyond their control. An increasing excitement flowed over him at the thought of being with her, possessing her, again. There was no doubt of that in his mind; he knew that Savina would come to him. She was far more ruthless in brushing aside artificial barriers, prejudices, than, until now, he. The figure of William Grove occupied him for a little, but he seemed insubstantial, not so much a being as a convention to be smashed in his own house.

Lee Randon decided not to speak again, to say good-bye, to f.a.n.n.y. It would only multiply the difficulties of his leaving; she might have another attack of rage, or--worse--of affection. He was amazed at his lack of feeling, a little disturbed: perhaps there was something fatally wrong, lacking, about him, and he was embarked on the first violent stage of physical and mental degradation. It couldn't be helped, he told himself, once more down stairs, in the hall. Beyond, the stool lay where f.a.n.n.y had kicked it; and he bent over to pick up the copper paper cutter from the floor. Putting it on the table, he reflected that f.a.n.n.y would, in all probability, destroy it. His handkerchief, stiff, black with dried blood, was in the crystal ash holder with a mahogany stand; and that, as unnecessarily unpleasant, he hid in a pocket.

The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner, the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was, undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better call that pa.s.sion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.

He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake: a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and f.a.n.n.y's room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark.

The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized him--that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties.

To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ...

the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an endeavor to waste no more precious time.

V

The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable immediate action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't--what, in reality, he breathed to himself was they--remain in New York. The comparatively orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by the one occasion which--he had been so careful to insist--must be the last, would regard him as merely importunate.

Strictly held to discretion by the fact of f.a.n.n.y, Savina might have found him then--more available than when free--only the acceptable model of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake, broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?

That could be approached only through an understanding of his feeling for her, what it was now and what it might become; not conspicuously easy of comprehension. Lee tried the old, the long inaccurately used, word, love. He asked himself the question squarely--did he love Savina?

d.a.m.ned if he knew! He might reply to that, he thought ruefully, if he grasped what love was, what the blasted phrase meant. As it was, it seemed to Lee, a dictionary of synonyms would be helpless to make all its varied significances distinct. He tried a simpler approach--did he want to be with Savina more than with anyone else? At last he had put a question to himself that he could answer: he most a.s.suredly preferred being with Savina to anyone else he knew. But that alone would not have taken him to her.

A simple desire on his part, naive like a daisy, could not have overthrown the structure of his being. Yet the connection between the two, the woman and the event, was undeniable, his impulse to go to her now irresistible. That last word, as fully as any, expressed what lately had happened to him. He was considering the occurrences logically while the fact was that logic hadn't been touched on, summoned, once. He had moved emotionally and not intellectually; he hadn't known, from hour to hour, in what direction he would proceed. Certainly nothing could be said in his defense on the score of common sense; that, though, didn't disturb him; at a time when he might have been said to rely on it, common sense had failed him utterly. He had thrown that over his shoulder. Nor was he searching for an exterior justification of his present anomalous position, for, briefly, an excuse; excuses were the furthest of all things from his mind. The truth was that he was decidedly exhilarated, as though he had left the hard narrow road for a gallop over the green. He was merely dwelling on, a.n.a.lyzing, the present as it was becoming the newly promising, the opening, future.